On Fri, Nov 08, 2002 at 10:22:16AM -0600, Mark Thornton wrote:
> I have just received a copy of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics that contains my article "Frederic Bastiat's Views on the Nature of Money," and Bastiat's article "What is Money." The original Bastiat article appeared in the Journal des economistes (1849) and the original translation by David Wells (1877) has long been out of print and hard to find. Bastiat has been criticized in recent years for not having written much on the topic of money, but in this article he shows that he understood money much better than the top monetary theorist of today, and certainly better than a Federal Reserve District Bank President!
Dear Mark,
I'd like to get an electronic copy of Bastiat's article, so as to publish it
on Bastiat.org (this article isn't available in English on the Internet yet).
Who shall I contact at QJAE so as to obtain that?
Did the QJAE reprint the original translation?
Do you have access to more original (or new) Bastiat translations
that aren't published on the web yet?
Could you publish them? Even scanned pages (preferrably 300 dpi)
or photocopies would be great. (But of course, fully digitized copies
are better).
As far as I can tell, Bastiat has written *a lot* on money!
I guess the criticism may come from the fact that he didn't make it
a sacro-sanct holy special economic construct, like statist economists do,
but put it in context of human action in general, where the case becomes
so clear and so simple that no big treatises are needed
to say all there is to say. As Bastiat quoted from Bentham:
"In political economy, there is much to learn and little to do."
In a similar vein, Turgot has written nice things, too.
PS: I'm back from the Libertarian Alliance / Libertarian International
conference in London. It was truly great! I hope that electronic proceedings
(and/or voice recordings of the speeches) will be available soon. Ok, I'm
biases, since I spoke there myself - but a lot of speakers impressed me.
Regards,
[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[ TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System | http://tunes.org ]
The fundamental class division in any society is not between rich and poor, or
between farmers and city dwellers, but between tax payers and tax consumers.
-- David Boaz, CATO Institute